Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  “You can’t trust these flashbacks!”

  “My owner! Good God, I’m a bloody product. I’m a weapon. I’m…”

  “You’re Zette McGee! You’re a woman. You’re a person! You’re a cop!”

  I was just saying, “No, no, no, no, no…” I said over and over, convulsing with horror. Now I understood why before I’d been so keen to kill myself.

  Gideon was stroking my hair as he held me, trying to soothe me. “It’s all right. It’s all right, Zette. It can’t hurt you.”

  “It’s had several pretty good tries, or don’t you remember? And it’s not finished!”

  “We’re not finished either. We’ve still got some tricks.”

  “Oh God, oh God, Smith!”

  “You can’t trust these flashbacks,” Gideon said again.

  “But they’re true. I’m at Cytex. They’re getting me ready for the client. I remember this stuff happening now.”

  “McGee, your entire life up to joining the cops in Winter City was fabricated and planted in your brain. You believed it completely. You still sometimes talk about stuff you remember from your childhood. You know it’s not real, but it feels real, to you, because it’s meant to feel real. And if they can plant this crap in your head, they can plant other crap in there and make you believe that, too. It’s what our whole culture does these days. Everything’s bloody simulated. You know that!”

  “I was there, Smith! I was right there, and I was doing it all, it was happening to me. It was as real as you are. As real as that bloody fish smell!”

  “Hydrogen Steel can’t be your owner, McGee.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s ridiculous! It’s a firemind!”

  “The Otaru message showed that it’s got extensive interests all through human space, including all these long-term projects. The Parallax Corporation must be one of its fronts.”

  “These flashbacks of yours aren’t real. Hydrogen Steel is screwing with your head!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Smith! I’m a bloody android! I was built in a bloody factory. I know this for a fact!”

  “ McGee, who the hell knows what you are now? And what does it matter? What does matter is that none of your flashbacks are in any way necessarily true! They could just as well be evidence of Hydrogen Steel messing with your head, and doing it pretty comprehensively, I might add.”

  “Why would it show me this stuff?”

  “To confuse you. To take your eyes off the prize. To give up! To set you against me!—”

  As we screamed at each other, I suddenly felt weak and dizzy for a moment.

  “McGee?” Gideon was ready to grab me.

  It was another memory flash.

  I am approaching the Cube…

  The air is cold; I can see my breath. The room looks wrong; the lines and angles are wrong.

  There is an icy breeze.

  The Cube is immense. It hovers over the floor, effortless.

  Sitting next to it, legs folded, hand on chin, watching, is a tall man in an expensive suit, wearing dark glasses. He is very interested in my reactions, I notice.

  Then I notice something else. In the Cube’s eerie witchlight, the man in the suit is playing with a gold coin, walking it back and forth across his knuckles.

  CHAPTER 34

  I heard Gideon’s voice calling me. “McGee? Do you need to sit? Here, sit on this sofa thing. I assure you it’s been freshly cleaned.”

  In my mind, I was still looking at the man with the coin. He was watching me, the way a harsh and demanding professor will scrutinize a clueless student. I remember the expression on the man’s face. He was trying to talk himself into keeping “the unit” (i.e. me) alive, when every instinct was telling him I was faulty, unreliable, and would probably fail at the first sign of stress. In his headware, he’d be running cost-benefit-risk calculations, and weighing up competing values.

  As Gideon helped me to the ghastly couch, I was thinking with phenomenal intensity. He was looking at me like he was afraid I might drop dead at any moment. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water? Anything at all? Just let me know, all right?”

  What did that man with the coin decide? Was I really that unit? Was I another unit simply given that memory?

  And was that really Gideon whom I saw?

  God, what if it was?

  How could he have been involved with Hydrogen Steel?

  The conspiracy theorist in the back of my mind thought that Gideon’s presence on this particular job made a certain crazy sense if he was Hydrogen Steel’s agent, didn’t it? The trusted friend, the reliable friend, so loyal and true you just know he’s dirty. He does everything you could ever want, takes care of you, rescues you, helps you in every way, goes above and beyond the requirements of friendship, and you fall for it so completely that, at the end, when he comes to kill you, when your defenses are completely stripped away, you never see it coming. It was so evil it could have been a work of art. Is that what I had here? My cop mind kept going over the possibilities, modeling the situation, and seeing too many scenarios in which it would be to Hydrogen Steel’s benefit to have an “ace in the hole” just in case everything else it tried failed. It was the rational strategy, covering all contingencies.

  Or was I losing my mind? At this point either theory seemed likely.

  Could it be true? Gideon himself said that all these flashbacks were lies. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?

  I felt pale and shaky. My psychostats were working hard, keeping things as calm as possible. I had no doubt that without their assistance I’d be a basket case by now, after all this. It was too much. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to wake up and actually have this whole wretched experience turn out to have been a lousy dream, and that I was still a cop doing my shift every day.

  “Talk to me, McGee,” Gideon said, gently.

  I looked at him. What a load of crap we’d been through these past months. He’d saved my ass how many times now? He’d been a good friend to me, or at least tried hard during those times when he couldn’t get used to my being an android. He always said that he was here to help me because he was a friend, and that came before any considerations about my machine-made origins. And I’d believed it all. I’d even — once we got these great new bodies — started noticing very disturbing feelings and thoughts, many of them involving Gideon! A man I knew to be many, many times older than I. It wasn’t right. How could I have such feelings and thoughts? They weren’t real, any more than I was real. It was all generated in my machine-powered brain and glands. I didn’t just live in a culture of hypersimulation; I was a simulation. I was a very fancy doll, with loads of features.

  I was making myself ill thinking like this.

  Gideon kept fussing, kept talking to me, being very solicitous and kind. And, the more he showed this side of himself to me, the more I doubted it. The more I looked at him from a distance, and thought, “Hmm, that’s pretty realistic there, Gideon Smith. Nice job.”

  My sense of trust was eroding away like beach sand at high tide.

  How much did I really know about Gideon? We’d met only a few years ago. He was already retired, from many careers, of which he spoke very little. Most of his stories were about his family and his childhood. Sometimes he alluded to things he’d read or seen during the course of his work with “the firm”, the Home System Foreign Service, Trade Division.

  And then there was all the stuff he could do with his headware. Secrets of the mystic East my fat ass!

  Not for the first time, I found myself idly wondering if Gideon had been a spy. And if, perhaps, his retirement was all part of his cover. Who’d suspect an old man 130 years of age of anything fishy? Even though, a man with so much experience, if he still had his faculties and wits, could be a formidable opponent.

&nbs
p; I should have talked about this with him. I should have given him the benefit of the doubt, and invited him to tell me what was going on, if anything. The man in my vision might not have been Gideon at all. It could have been any number of tall men with a thing for expensive suits, and a passion for ancient gold coins.

  Right, I told myself. Keep telling yourself that, Zette.

  How long ago would that have been, that flashback? The clues available suggested that I’d been assigned to the Winter City Police Service at the very beginning of my police career, fresh out of the Academy. Which, as far as I could tell, was about thirty-plus standard years ago. Which would have made Gideon a nice round one hundred years of age. Once considered remarkable, even venerable, people these days routinely attained ages of one hundred and greater. Medical science and technology kept us going and going almost indefinitely.

  So far I was fairly sure that Hydrogen Steel operated the Parallax Corporation, and that it was probably some kind of front operation providing “uniquely talented personnel”, human and otherwise, to anybody requiring some highly deniable black ops. Such outfits, I knew, frequently had connections to other, larger, governments and media organizations. Mind-control, crowd control, media control; it was all just business to these outfits. Supply and demand; profit and loss; all ethical considerations beside the point. I would have to do some digging.

  I remembered what Gideon had been saying right before that last flashback: if the memories were false (like so many of my other memories), and planted deliberately to drive a wedge between Gideon and me, the plan could hardly be more successful, could it? Here I was, sitting next to a man I felt I knew nothing about, and whose every gesture of kindness and friendship I mistrusted. As a copper I’d always been inclined to doubt everything. People lied so much, so often, and about the most trivial of things, it beggared belief. Some people couldn’t help themselves, they were just compulsive liars. Others, though, appeared to regard it as a point of honor to feed the cops lies, and to do what they could to muddy the waters, even if all these lies, taken together, made no sense and were full of contradictions. I remember one particular bastard telling me, cheerfully, “But that’s life all over, isn’t it? Just full of contradictions, eh?”

  What to do, what to do?

  I looked at Gideon. The big git was looking so concerned. He was worried. I hadn’t said anything to him for some time. That was unwise of me. If he really was compromised, he’d surely start to realize I had twigged to what was going on. I’d have to say something, soon, one way or another.

  My first instinct was to go all melodrama and just yell at him. The whole, “how could you?” thing, and accuse him, point-blank, of working for Hydrogen Steel.

  Which would be neither clever nor wise. Better by far to sit and watch.

  My stomach felt awful. All this crap in my head was making me tense, and the tension was making me ill. And this was with the stats going full-blast in there to keep everything from boiling over. I mean, the thought kept nagging: what if Gideon’s perfectly loyal and true, and really is your friend? How’s he likely to feel when he finds out you doubted him — and worse! You can’t keep up this pretense for long. Undercover was never your forte as a copper, and the skills will only have degraded these past few years.

  I didn’t know. Doubt ate at me. I needed to vomit. Standing suddenly, I rushed to the toilet, but didn’t quite make it.

  Gideon rushed about, got me a hot and very sweet cup of tea, made sure I laid down on the couch for a while, and applied a cool, damp cloth to my forehead. “You don’t need to fuss about like this, Smith. I’m all right, really.” My voice sounded strange and unconvincing, like a bad impersonation of me. Gideon simply smiled and insisted I lie down and keep the cloth on my head.

  Then I remembered a salient detail that made me sit up, still holding the cloth to my head. “You said we’re in the Aldebaran system.”

  “Yes, that’s right. We have to get in touch with the Heart of Darkness hab.”

  “But didn’t you also say there’s another firemind out here somewhere?”

  “Chromium Lux, yes. It’s watching us, but so far taking no action, probably because we haven’t done anything yet.” He flashed me a glimpse of the nav feed, which showed us a long way out from the weird double-binary stars that we thought of as Aldebaran. The Heart of Darkness habitat orbited one of the charred, inner worlds. The close-up view of those four dancing stars would, I thought, be enough to make anybody crazy.

  “It’s watching us?”

  “Its sensors are all over us, all the time.”

  I swore. “Can we get out of here in a hurry if we have to?”

  He touched his head in a few places, and looked like he was still in some degree of pain. “If we have to. Not far, but yes.”

  “Where’s Hydrogen Steel?”

  “Just a moment…”

  All I could think was that Gideon had gone to a lot of trouble to drop us in a huge amount of trouble. Here we were, albeit at a destination we had to reach, but here was a firemind all set to blow us to quarks if we showed the slightest sign of, well, anything. We could have gone anywhere else, and planned our next move together. But no. Gideon brought us right here, and damn near killed himself doing it.

  Doing me a favor by getting on with the case — or setting me up for target-practice?

  “Hydrogen Steel’s changed ships,” he said, looking back at me. “It’s heading out here.”

  “This gets better and better…”

  “It should arrive in about six minutes.”

  I took this in, and felt awful. “How long would it take to access the Heart of Darkness’ maildrop network?”

  “From out here? A few minutes, round trip.”

  “Can you get us closer?”

  “I can try…” He didn’t look pleased, but he was prepared to have a go, and he sat down and started doing his shaman thing.

  Three minutes later, he looked up, sweaty and pale, hands shaking noticeably. “We’re in orbit around the hab’s planet, out of their sight, I hope. McGee, you’re on.”

  We used the information Javier had left for Airlie in his letter, and quickly penetrated deep into the phenomenally well-guarded data fortress that was the Heart of Darkness.

  “Hydrogen Steel will be here in two minutes,” Gideon reported. “Chromium Lux is now taking an interest, and is closing on our location at speed.”

  “At speed?” I said. “Why not just pop over instantly and be done with it?”

  “Not sure, McGee,” Gideon said. “At a guess I’d surmise that there could be difficulties using the displacement drive this close to such a strange multi-star gravity well. In any case, get busy.”

  There was a very great deal of material in Javier’s account. Almost all of it was spam, pornography of various exotic varieties, and ads for “Get Immortal Now!” services. I filtered and searched, and found a file marked for Airlie that his letter to her mentioned. “Got it!”

  “Chromium Lux has launched AIADs!” said Gideon. These were nasty anti-ship warfare weapons: Autonomous Informational Assault Devices. Small, self-powered, homing bots that looked for every conceivable trace a ship might leave, including heat, spacetime deformation, hull armor material, drive emission profiles, you name it. The idea was to launch a swarm of the bastards, which would close on the target, latch onto the hull, and start trying to hack into your ShipMind. With access to ShipMind the enemy could control your ship, and, if they were evil enough, even interfere with crew headware functions. Their secondary function involved the release of armor-eating nanobots. In theory, by the time the attack ships arrived, the target vessel would be dead in the water, and ripe for boarding or missile attacks.

  “Time to go, Smith!”

  Gideon got mystical. We flashed out of there.

  When Gideon emerge
d from his trance, he swore.

  “What?”

  “Three AIADs got us before we left…”

  “Can you…?”

  Gideon interrupted, holding up a finger. “The Otaru kernel is doing something.” He looked astonished, and scared.

  I shut my mouth. I still felt horrible inside. When I went to check ShipMind, to see how the attack was going, I found ShipMind offline — and yet ship’s systems were all fine. Something big and frightening was filling the conceptual space where ShipMind “lived” in the ship’s infostructure.

  Gideon opened one of his eyes and looked at me with it. “What did Javier leave for Airlie?” His voice sounded strained, like it was coming from far away.

  I checked the file. “It’s an address, and bank access codes.” I was dismayed.

  “What kind of address?”

  “Residential. It’s Javier’s bolt-hole. It’s deep inside Mars.”

  “Did you say Mars?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “We came all this way, and it’s on Mars?”

  “If you don’t believe me…”

  “I believe you. I just don’t know how we’re getting there.” His voice grew fainter, more distant, by the moment.

  “Smith? What’s…?”

  “I … Oh, McGee…” His eye closed. He slumped over in a heap.

  Before I had time to think, my headware chimed to announce new mail.

  It was from the Otaru kernel in Gideon’s head. “Inspector McGee,” it began. “This vessel is under heavy informational assault from the devices attached to the outer hull.”

  I suddenly had a very bad feeling about where things were going.

  Otaru went on: “I am not what once I was. Each of the devices on the hull has almost the power of an infant firemind. They are designed to attack capital ships. My host, Mr. Smith, is occupied directing the ship’s defense. He is, however, making no headway. The devices are too powerful. He has asked me to ask you, therefore, to undertake an EVA outside the ship to physically remove and destroy the devices. Time is of the essence.”